Video: Engadget Fondles iPad 3 Prototype, Few Surprises Found

It’s getting increasingly hard for Apple to surprise us in the years following the original iPhone in 2007 (OS X Mountain Lion was one notable recent exception.) Case in point: Engadget just got touchy-feely with an iPad 3 prototype and spoiled all the non-fun for the rest of us come Wednesday.Engadget has teamed upwith the cats over at M.I.C. Gadget to go hands-on with a supposed iPad 3 prototype -- or rather, parts of it, since the real deal won’t be unveiled until this Wednesday in San Francisco.

“What we have here is allegedly the external essentials of the ‘iPad 3,’ which include a white glass cover (sans frame) with a home button already installed, along with a 3G-ready aluminum body plus cables for the dock connector and the volume rocker,” the report reveals. “With a quick glance you may easily mistake this as just the iPad 2, but look close enough and you'll spot the larger lens on the prototype, which may suggest that Apple's finally giving its tablet a more capable back camera.

“There's also a more subtle difference between the two bodies,” the report continues. “Not only is this ‘iPad 3’ marginally thicker, but the curvature from the flat bottom to the sides is ever so slightly more emphasized, thus providing a tad more internal space for the components -- most likely the battery for the sake of feeding the rumored LTE radio.”

Yeah, okay, not much to see there, but what were you expecting, really? There’s only so much Apple can do with the iPad form factor to begin with, which is why Android-based tablet makers seem to have so much trouble mimicking the device in the first place. Stay tuned for the rest of the details on Wednesday, March 7 at 10am PST when we hear it from Apple first-hand.